Architecture as reading virtuality secrecy monstrosity

1. This article was downloaded by: [New York University] On: 06 May 2015, At: 12:34 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Architectural Education Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjae20 Architecture as Reading; Virtuality, Secrecy, Monstrosity Donald Kunze Published online: 08 Jan 2014. To cite this article: Donald Kunze (1988) Architecture as Reading; Virtuality, Secrecy, Monstrosity, Journal of Architectural Education, 41:4, 28-37 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10464883.1988.10758499 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

2. Architecture as Reading; Virtuality, Secrecy, Monstrosity Donald Kunze was born in North Car- olina and educated at N. C. State Uni- versity School of Design (architecture), Georgia State University, and Penn State University (geography). His dissertation was on the imagination's role in the perception of space. He is currently Assis- tant ProfessorofArchitectureat PennState University, where he has taught studio for the past four years. In 1985 he co- founded the Commonplace Confer- ences, a series ofsymposia dedicated to the collaborative interests of philoso- phers, geographers, and architects on the topic of place. His book, Thought and Place, The Architecture of Eternal Places in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, has been published recently by Peter Lang (See JAE, Vol. 41, No.3, Spring 88 for a review of this book). He is currently working on the use of metaphor in architectural design and interpretation, and is also planning for "The Year of Camillo," a series of events dedicated to the re- appreciation of the relation between architecture and memory. The phenomenon of virtual space is fundamental to the way human beings relate perceptually, behaviorally, and existen- tially to their world. Virtuality is the presence of what is not literally present, and it thus enables the immanence of building to be annealed to the pastand future, analogous form, and hypothetical possibility. In sum, virtuality is synonymous with "architecture" proper, as opposed to building simple. Through the use of gesture, the non-present is made present and given a secret status ruled by a non- classical or "grotesque" order. The principle of our access to the virtual is based on the act of reading, where the movement from the actual to the virtual is simultaneously a spatial and a philosophical transformation. Reading is not simply the translation of phonetic or iconographic characters into their linguistic equivalents, but a restructuring of the space of appearance. The origins and evolution ofthis "space ofreading" are characterized by a distinctive architecture, and the architecture of inhabit- able spaces is conditioned by this distinctive architecture: the architecture of reading is the means of reading architecture. Summer 1988 JAE 41/4 All night I sat reading a book, Sat reading as if in a book Of sombre pages. The sombre pages bore no print Except the trace of burning stars In the frosty heaven. -from Wallace Stevens, "The Reader." Architecture is an art of presence that depends upon an actual or imaginary specification of some spatial situation scaled in relationship to the human body. But, the experience of architecture is not determined simply by a harmony of building with the body and its needs but by a doubling of the architectural "code" into two parts. The first part is the order of the literal building, which runs according to the consideration of the physical, functional, and even the sym- bolic circumstances of building. This completes the Vitruvian triad of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, for even beauty can be considered under the conventional demands of a society for the taste- ful, significant, and decorous. The second kind of order is analogical and ana-logical in comparison with the first. And, rather than assume a subor- dinate and complementary role to the dominate concerns of function, substance, and taste, this "lunar beauty" (as Auden would have called it) finds its strongest voice in counterpoint. This can be seen more clearly where the unifi- cation of an "architectural concept" is absent and one's experience is thrown back on real events that nonetheless engage a sense of unreality, as in Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Fig. 1) In this utterly effective work, we find that the two orders seem to be engaged in an actual com- bat; and even the physical forms com- pose a diagram of opposition that shows this relationship in its radical denomi- nations. (Fig. 2) The shape of the design is literally a 'V', but the polish of the black granite dou- bles this as an 'X', or 'chi.' The gradual descent into the virtual space created by the wedge allows the discovery of the reflection to creep up on the observer, and in the context of an emotionally charged moment the effect is cleared of all sentimentality and charged with the gnostic legibility of what is happening. The "unreal" presence of the virtual reflections informs us that the real dou- ble code, always and ever, is that of the living and the dead. The architecturally problematic crossing (aporia) is achieved symbolically in the chi-asm of the reflecting wall, and its effects are distributed with such precision that all who encounter the wall "know" that the joints are points of penetration into a sepul- chre, where the reflected images of the visitors are blurred into spectres of the dead standing behind their names. "Virtual space," as a special form of signification, should be distinguished from the ideas of reference, symbolization, and architectural quotation. These require participation in the culture that produced them as conventionalized acts. In contrast, virtual space strikes free from convention. It is not culture-specific or quotable, because it is basically non- representational. No idea or concept "stands behind" its effects because of its virtuality. Maya lin's wall will be understood long after the Vietnamese War and its tragedies have slipped from public memory. It actualizes an imaginary truth rather than a conventional idea. Its effectiveness is guaranteed by the untranslatability, the public secrecy, of its text. What is the origin of this doubling of the architectural code, the efficacy of an alien and prohibited order alongside the normative? In the place of an architecture of concepts and ideas, this shadow realm despite its radical otherness serves to bind together the most disparate com- munities. To call on a master of these kinds of distinctions, Iwould like to invoke a characterization made by Gaston Bachelard, who wrote in L'fau et les Reves: "The imagining forces of our mind develop along two very different lines. ''In some cases, they find their impetus in novelty; they are amused by the pictur- esque, by variety, by unexpected hap- Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

3. where virtuality is a prominent force: gesture and monstrosity. Gesture, as a "silent language," places us between the pure conventionality of known forms and the mute unintelligibility of objects. Monstrosity isthe question of mazed form that, in the face of its own chaos, surveys the most subtle and delicate of truths. ..................................... ---....-.... ------ 1·2 Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, Washington , D.C. (photo and sketch by author) penings . . . . Other forces plumb the depths of being, where they search for the primitive and the eternal. They rise above seasonality and history. In the natural world both inside and outside us,theyproduce seeds; seedswhere form is thrust into substance, where form is internal. "Putting this philosophically, one would be able to distinguish two imaginations: one imagination which gives life to formal cause and one imagination which gives life to material cause or, more suc- cinctly, formal imagination and material imagination."l The a-conceptual character of this "material imagination" was early sensed by Mozart, who wrote in a letter to Bar- oness von WaldstCidten that he regretted that he had studied music instead of architecture for he had often heard it said that the best architect is a man who never has an idea. An alternative title for this essay might have been "Archi- ----------"",- ------- "'""'" tecture without Ideas," but such a title without Mozart laughing behind it gives the wrong impression. The poetic virtual space of Maya Lin's memorial is, coincidentally, a virtual space in the ordinary optical sense. What I would like to develop, given the lessons of this straightforward example, is a general theory of virtuality. In the rather unique circumstances of the reflecting walls of the memorial, the meeting place of the living and the dead is given the diagrammatic form of chiasmus. I will argue that chiastic collision is funda - mental to virtuality. As against the con- sistencyand rationality ofordinary space, we find values opposed to the Vitruvian values of utilitos, firmitas, and venustas-counter-values that do not really compete with the normative Vitruvian order as much as they deepen and inform the relationship between conventional space and the prohibited order of the grotesque. To see how this might be so, we must address two other domains The Silent Language of Gesture: Secrecy Gestures "speak" in a way that pre- serves a duality between saying something and not saying it, a kind of atten- uated or concentated language that is characteristic of the hieroglyph, flag, and emblem. Gestures, to be interpreted properly, must be placed back into a narrative context, for they are abbrevi- ations of dramatic action. But, given the catholicity and historical endurance of this fabular tradition across different cultures and periods, gesture and other forms of silent speech constitute a form of universal language. When the gesture rather than speech or the text is used to signify, being silent takes two senses. First, it suggests that one cannot speak or write on account of some restriction or lack of ability. (I will refer to all such limitations as "privation.") Second, it indicates that something must not be said, for example, a secret or unpronouncable name. (I will refer to these collectively as "prohibition.") One remarkable quality of the coupling of privation and prohibition in gesture and other forms of silent speech is that it is often difficult to tell which is in force. One waves for lack of any better means of greeting a friend across a crowded room. But when the message is an insult, threat, or curse, what can't be spoken is taken for what should not be spoken . The gesture is made as a milder form of the ma/adicta, the curse, which places for more serious obliga- tions on the sender and receiver. But it suggests that virtuality may require cir- cumstancesof privation to make the cru- cial connection between the virtual and the forbidden. The coupling of privation and prohibition is especially evident in architecture where either limitations of site or mate- Summer 1988 JAE 41/4 Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

4. rial or the unavoidable occurrence of ruin bring about the sense of a project tragically interrupted by death or grief. Sir John Soane's museum-house in london, built over an extended period of time within the existing structures of three town-houses, is a project limited in the first sensethat has something of the second sensein its final effects. (Fig. 3) This residence is so familiar to architectural audiences, that its history and lay- out need little introduction," The idea of creating a museumwithin the context of a family seat had already occurred to Soane, but the restrictions of the apart- mentsat lincoln's InnFieldsalso required this "virtual" program to occupy a virtual space. Within the ordinary domestic spaces, there are thin spaces running alongside the gallery and near the ceil- ing, created by coves and lanterns. Two interior courts maintain a giddy balance between inside and outside, and the "Roman tribune" ofthe main gallery draws a vertiginous vortex of plaster castsdown to the Egyptian sarcophagus Soane pur- chased from the art smuggler Balzoni. But perhaps the most extreme effect is produced by the hundreds of mirrors Soane slivered into nearly every available panel. This reticular ghost-grid works like a crystal poche that super- imposes the virtual houseonto the actual with cartographic precision. In weaving through thereal and reflectedthinspaces, the visitor becomes aware that Soane, the compulsive pedagogue, is putting forth a lesson in architecture. (Fig. 4) The virtual museum is explained architecturally at several locations that work like "primal scenes." For example, in the picture room, a room thatextendsbeyond the major rectangle formed by the first two of Soane's three converted apart- ments, large hinged panels fold out to reveal a series of paintings. The last panels on the south wall open onto a void in which Richard Westmacott's Statuteofa Nymph perches on a slender beam. Here, the visitor is allowed into thethin space behind the mirrors. Behind the statue is a view of the monastic ruins and the monk's tomb. We know from the lore of melancholy that this is the "rhe- Summer1988 JAE 41/4 3 Sir John Soone's museum house, london (photo by outhor) torical" tomb of the architect. The confirmation of the "secret reading" of Soane'smuseum-house in thethin angelic space revealed behind the leaves of paintings converts the privation of the wall poche to the prohibited order of the niche. Monstrosity Images of virtuality and secrecy involve important questions about the nature of order: the coexistence in architecture of two different kinds of order, actual and virtual; and the role of gesture in mediating these as if they were two dis- tind spatial regions. Now it is necessary to take up the problem of what is meant by "order." Themonsterisa mythological form drawn from a rhetorical phenomenon. Philol- ogists have claimed that until language developed an understanding of causal- ity, mediation, or other logical pro- cesses, the relationship between things was indicated by simple juxtaposition, or parataxis, in contrast to the opposite strategy of hierarchical ordering, hypo- taxis. In the logic of emblems, a fool and a skeleton holding hands convey the complex truth of a momento mon, and the absence of words seems to contrib- ute to the depth of poignancy. The Sphinx, a kind of paradigm exem- plar of this form of meaning, belongs to a category of forms that express temporal relationships. (Fig. 5) This com- posite image is a visual riddle whose "answer" is "the year," and the disjunc- tion of animal parts additionally con- veys the ancient idea that the seasons make war on each other, as separate combatants. The identification of para- 4 Sir John Scone's museum house, interior (photo by outhor) tactic form with the riddle comes from two sources. First, simple juxtaposition generates many meanings, not just one, and often the different interpretations are strongly at odds. Such was unintention- ally the case when Erasmuschose as his emblem the god Terminus and the motto "I yield to none" (concedo nul/;). He had intended this to refer to the all-powerful rule of death, a momento moti, but his enemies took it to be a statement of vanity, as if Erasmus had intended to play the role of Terminus himself. Second, the subject matter of emblems and other paratactic forms originates in mythand ritual. TheSphinxasthe emblem of the annual cycle survives as an arti- fact of the original dramatic enactment of thesacred mysteryofseasonal change. Sacrifice, death, and rebirth involved knowledge shared only by initiates who hid their secrets beneath the masks of riddling icons. That the monster was consciously thought to be a paradoxical or illicit "marriage" of contrasting forms and ideas is suggested by the Roman practice of calling the children of pros- titutes "monsters"-literally the prod- uctsof illicit unions-and on this ground throwing them into the Tiber." But my purpose for using the monster as a memory image is comparatively mun- dane. The monster runs against the idea of order usually discussed in architectural theory, namely that of Classical ideas of order-canons of proportion- ality, subordination of parts to wholes, and correct composition. The ideals of Classicism and more especially neo- Classicism in architecture could be com- pared to the role taken in logic by the principle of non-contradiction. Funda- Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

5. 5 From Giovio Vescovo di Nocero, O;o/ogo defl';mpresse mi/itarai etamarose (Lyon: Guglielmo Rovillio, 1574) ED tive terms. With virtuality, the negative is present as a possible spatial region, with imaginary extension and structure. With the exchange of privation for prohibition at the boundary of this region, the merely negative becomes gnostic. And the monster's riddle invites the articulation of the negative, the unravelling of its mazed form. Virtuality, secrecy, and monstrosity describe a place of learning and discovery which is frightful and liminal but also compelling and attractive. mentally, both involve a positive valua- tion of clarity, continuity, and consistency. But the monster stands for nothing if not for contradiction. Monstrosity is perceived only if one sacrifices the literal and sane world of classical taxis. The Medievalist Ernst Curtius has given a definitive account of how these two opposed kinds of order are related in history and culture. Western art and literature have been affected by Classi- cism ever since people began reflecting on what makes art crt.' The idea of the Classical grows out of the practice of selecting the works of early authors as models for imitation in schools. Alex- andrian philologists were the first fo put together a physical selection of earlier literature, and since then the question of what works should be included in this canon has been debated. The term clas- sicus grew out of this debate, as where Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae, XIX, 8) advised the use of writers who belonged to the first class of citizens, the classici. This political bias against the proletariat has continued intact, it seems,to the extent that even the modern employment of Classical forms by certain contemporary historicist architects carries with it a propaganda for the aristocracy. The emphasis on the "Classic" is inevitably an emphasis on authority. And, in the context of a society dominated by private corporations, a conservative if not reactionary ethic is to be expected. Curtius, however, notes that Classicism has always been accompanied by an equal and opposite critical force. For lack of a name with fewer historical con- notations, Curtius borrows the term "Mannerism" to designate the a-historical common denominator of all tenden- cies opposed to Classicism. Understood in this sense, Curtius argues, Mannerism is a constant in European literature and, one might argue, in the arts as a whole. I use the monster to remind us of the principle feature of Mannerism: its diet of contradiction, enigma, mental diffi- culty, and metaphor. In these terms, there is no point in label- ing a period of history. Rather, a significant truth is to be found in understanding the impulse behind "Classicism"- in whatever form-and the possible response to this impulse as a "Manner- ism." The monster stands for this search and represents the kinds of meanings that Classicism can describe only indirectly. The point is not to condemn the classical desire to generate canon- ical form, but rather to complete the picture that Classicism cannot finish because of its devotion to consistency and noncontradiction. The Analogy of Reading It has been necessary to enumerate the three parts of a non-Classical architectural signification-virtuality, secrecy, and monstrosity-because there is no wide-spread agreement about what constitutes a Mannerist presence in architecture. The part of architecture that can be consumed through conventional use and symbolization of a building is well served by the Classical triad of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas. It seems unlikely that anyone would endorse publicly an alternative Mannerist triad of "virtuality, secrecy, and monstrosity." But the turning point comes when, like Sartre in his analysis of Nothingness, we begin to evaluate the negative in posi- Virtuality calls for a "theory of reading," for even the momentary recognition of such a Mannerist order confronts our ordinary ideas about building. But there is a sense where "reading" here is used as more than a characterization. Read- ing can be regarded simply as the commonplace act whereby the real space of the reader connects itself to the imaginary space of the book without philosophical perplexity. But reading is precisely that form of imaginary motion and time that suspends, in an ordinary way, rules of form similar to those that dominate architecture through convention. A question of dimensionality seems to stand in the way of any use of reading as a metaphor for understanding architecture. Reading's linear array of signs produces images that, in turn, construct the three-dimensional fictive world of the book. If architecture is thought to exist as an already three- or four-dimensional phenomenon, an act of reading cannot occur in any ordinary sense. But- and this is the pivotal issue of my thesis-what if the dimensionality of a work of art is not automatically given by the medium of the art form, but is drawn from our experience of the work? What if, in addition, the serial dimensionality of perception and the multi-dimensional restructuring of memory are implicit and indispensible to the understanding of any work? Then it might be possible and even necessary to say that reading is our principle metaphor for the way in which lived artachieves abiding permanence through virtuality, gesture, and re-ordering. In this light, architecture's principal connection to philosophies of language are not to the text as phenomenon (to be Summer 1988 JAE41/4 Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

6. deconstructed) but to text as experience, which is intrinsically self-deconstructing. But even where architecture is "writ large," not everyone reads. In the Soane Museum, for example, tourists hang like glazed bats before paintings, plaster casts, or mummified cats but pay no attention to the miraculous use of space. If architects conceived of reading as the strategy of concealing esoteric meanings within their designs, architecture would be understood only by specialists and critics. It could not, as in the past, serve as a means to civic well-being. But the insistent human need for a virtual as well as an actual world-and the neces- sity of reading and not just inhabiting architecture-offers, additionally, an escape from this condition. Architects are given barely more than four moments to construct an opportunity for reading. As in Soane's case, the first opportunity is provided by some technical means of creating a swerve from the ordinary understanding of a space. (I would borrow Lucretius's term, c/inamen, meaning "turbulence within a flow.") Soane does this with mirrors, vertiginous spaces, thin spaces, and aedicu/ae. Thesecond opportunity comes with the chance to repeat this swerve, with a variation that clarifies its meaning and strengthens its intent. The third occasion is a confirmation. The fourth chance is carried out as a reader's experiment that in strong architecture is met decisively, as in the picture-room or tribune of Soane's museum. This four-step theory of architecture is a corruption of Jan Mukarovsky's account of how art is consumed, where the linear temporal order of reading is comple- mented by an inverted order of memory," reading -? realization ABCD -? D' ABC -? C' A B -? B' A -? A' Mukarovsky attempted simply to distinguish the "consumption" of a work of art from the acts of mental reordering Summer 1988 JAE41/4 whereby the immediate past experience of the work was added to the present moment, as an accumulating context of evolving meanings. In architecture, this corresponds closely to the way in which the building is consumed in ordinary time (horizontally left to right), but is informed by a virtual order that we might call "architecture," elements re-ordered through memory to effect the presence of a virtual space within a literal one (shown here as a vertical, upward motion). The connection is not determi- native or indicative, but gestural. The body's anatomy and capacity to move physically and mentally is made into a sign executing a trace within a labyrinth of built spaces. The successful comple- tion of a swerve (c/inamen) from normative meanings of the building depends on the ability to elaborate a "silent language" out of the conventions of form, and to represent this zone of silence as a separate spatial region, an architecture. Interlude The study of questions of meaning in architecture has understandably drawn from dominant traditions in linguistics, criticism, and philosophy. The four most influential have been hermeneutics, structuralism, semiotics (derived from the Philosophy of C. S. Pierce), and semiol- ogy (based on the structural linguistics of Soussure]." The models of authenticity employed by these traditions have for the most part been based on the inten- tionality, competence, or performance of the speaker/listener or writer. Struc- tural linguistics has preferred systems based on phonology and has emphasized fundamental differences between the two tropic strategies of metaphor and metonymy. Hermeneutics has preferred the original conditions of writing as its basis of authority. Semiotics and semiol- ogy have included a broad range of human activities as types of speech acts (myth, ritual, social interaction, mass communication, and politics, for example). Without giving due justification for saying so, I would claim that, of the four modes of linguistic behavior, speaking/ listening (almost always paired) and writing have been emphasized, but reading has been subordinated to other interests. And, with a neglect of reading as a general metaphor for human communication or understanding, the intrinsically spatial problem of the dimensionality of reading has never been understood. Certainly, some correction of this situation seems to have been made in the last ten years' worth of "reader response" theories. But one finds that few of these recent schemas consider reading as a spatial, let alone an architectural, matter. looking from the other side, it hardly needs to be said that few of the theories about how space or architecture is perceived take very seriously the implica- tions of reading as a fundamental human behavior, except to use reading as a general characterization for any form of interpretation, as did Galileo in his sug- gestion that nature was a "book" to be read by one who understood its (math- ematical) language. One important exception is the philosophy of culture of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) which takes the radical position that "reading" historically precedes ordinary articulate speech in that the first act of the human mind proper is the perception of nature as a sign made from gods to mortals. Subsequent attempts to interpret these signs-through divination, sacrifice, and the exercise of religion in general- establish the basis for social institutions that are later secularized. "The first men, who spoke by signs, nat- urally believed that lightning bolts and thunderclaps were signs made to them by Jove; whence from nuo, to make a sign, came numen, the divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy to express the divine majesty. They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of Jove. The science of this language the gentiles universally believed to be divination, which by the Greeks was called theology, meaning the science of the language of the gods."7 It is significant that Vico's emphasis on reading is accompanied by an account of primitive mankind's metaphysics as Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

7. one creating a " virtual" world out of the natural one, established by mute signs held to be divine; and that the science of these signs was regarded as secret. No less important is Vico's argument that this perception of a virtual and divine nature occurred because, in the first place, the primitive mind was unable to form an abstract idea of things; and that their mental privation was converted into a poetry of virtuality as animism. "For it has been shown that it was defi- ciency of human reasoning power that gave rise to poetry so sublime that the philosophies which came afterward, the arts of poetry and criticism, have produced none equal or better, and have even prevented its production.:" Vico gave a primary place to the for- mation of the idea of Jove out of the signs of lighting and thunder, calling it the first "imaginative universal" (univ- ersale fantastico].9 Unlike the abstract universals used by the modern mind which are drawn out of the properties of particulars, imaginative universals gen- erated a world around them. How was this done? The answer to this question may provide a means of connecting -the world of Vice's "first men" to the architectural situation where, in contemporary circumstances, new and virtual worlds arise out of an act of imagination that we call reading. The Antiquity of Reading If one may be freed from the limited mis- conception that reading is only the visual or tactile consumption of phonetic alphabets or standardized ideograms, one is forced to grant reading a far greater role in the evolution of human consciousness. If Vico was correct in claiming that " reading" involved the apprehension of nature as a series or system of signs divinely or otherwise made to be read, then reading begins at precisely that moment when a true human mental life becomes possible. The two events, in fact, are indistinguishable as cause and effect. Communication can exist without language, as sociobiolo- gists have shown. But writing can exist only when mankind collectively realizes that the stimulus and response are at first disconnected and then rejoined by the symbol. Symbols as mediators draw a veil over nature as stimulus, creating a world of virtual possibilities that, in turn, make possible a hypothetical future for human works. Reading, however, imposes a logical condition of enormous importance. The sign, as something written, must be regarded as something left behind. It establishes that the place of writing is elsewhere, and temporally prior to the act of reading. Harold Bloom has given usthe ideal term for this condition, drawn from Kabbalistic lore: the idea of zimzum, or "divine contrcction."!? The mystic authors of the lohar held that the creation of the world was atfirst impossible, since God was evenly distributed throughout a perfect universe. For the world to appear, it was necessary for God to contract his divinity, and this contraction was called zimzum. In the wake of this movement backwards, signs were left behind as fragmentary clues of God's presence. But the space of human existence was charged by the negative quality of this contraction. It took on the geometry of the curse, which is, etymo- logically, round or spiral. For our purposes, it is not the event itself but the architecture of the event that is most interesting. The first condition of this architecture is a distinction between two entities, one active, the other pas- sive. Latin etymology shows that the word for "heaven," (coelum) also means " wedge-shaped burin," an instrument used for writing. Along these lines, the sky is a kind of stone or clay skin upon which celestial events write difficult texts. Birds, communicating between the worlds of gods and men, become special envoys. The Stoic tradition refined much of this metaphor of mythic reading, to the extent that we might borrow some of its basic ideas. Andrea Steuco developed the idea of coelum as both "heaven" and a wedge-shaped writing instrument by reviving the classical distinction between animus, the principle of active mentality and creation, and anima, nature as pas- sive substcnce." Heaven was assayed as pure ether or fire: triangular in shape and present only as brightness. In iconic representations of mind and God, this symbol is coupled with the eye to emphasize its immaterial and supersen- sible nature. Vico elaborated this connection in his Autobiography: II From the word coelum, which means both 'chisel' and the 'great body of air,' [Vico] conjectured that perhaps the Egyptians, by whom Pythagoras was instructed, had been of the opinion that the instrument with which nature makes everything was the wedge and that this was what they meant their pyramids to signify. Now the Latins called nature ingenium, whose principal property is sharpness; thus intimating that nature forms and deforms every form with the chisel of air.... And the Latins used the word anima for air as the principle which gives the universe motion and life, and on which the ether acts as male on female. The ether insin- uated into living beings the Latins called animus; hence the common Latin distinction, 'anima vivimus, animo senti- mus': by the soul we have life by the spirit sensation.... And just as soul is acted on by spirit, so spirit would be acted on by what the Latins called mens, meaning thought ... And this thought or mind would come to men from Jove, who is the mind of ether. Finally, if all this were so, the operating principle of all things in nature would be corpuscles of pyra- midal shape."12 The ancient world believed that divine writing was done in the underworld, based on the evidence of the daily rota- tion of the heavens. Signs read at night must have been written during the day, beneath the horizon. Like the sun, they suffered death and rebirth each night, treading the labyrinth of Hades. The underworld's reputation as a place of writing came about through the function of the horizon. By mediating day and night, dark and light, the horizon was quickly homologized to other polar mediations: the visible and the invisible, knowledge and ignorance, garden and wilderness, life and death. Writing came from the liminal space ofthe dead, where eternity afforded the privilege of perfect knowledge of the past, present, and future. Summer 1988 JAE 41/4 Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

8. Because of this homology of mythic thought, we can study the under-world as the primal scene of writing by looking at the ways it was transposed into other forms. The ascent and descent of the sun in the sky was correlated to the hero's odyssey and trials in the wilderness. The cave-the prison of the sun-became the prototypical place of initiation, instruction, and burial. It was for many subsequent centuries the preferred symbol for birth, as we see in early paintings of the Nativity. One might even see the logic of the horizon employed as a structure of inquiry and exploration in as late a source as Herodotus, where every report, or logos, established itself in terms of a location along the line between the Greek world and unredeemable bar- barians. The resulting mega-horizon defined the Greek oecumene as a bounded disc of visibility surrounded by the unknown, whose remoteness was given the shorthand iconography of sav- ages, cannibals, and monsters." The place of reading for first cultures was established as the epitome of the horizon and the region it bounded. Vico observed that the first men desired to get a better view of the sky, the source of all human law, by clearing places in the forest that were simultaneously temples, observatories, burial grounds, sacrifi- cial altars, and the fields of an incipient agriculture. The foundation rites of ancient cities preserve this cross-con- tamination of meanings in their use of the plow to mark out the city walls; the sacrifice of a victim held to be the twin of the founder; and the meaning of the altar as a mundus or mouth connecting the living with the ancestral dead-a connection that fed the dead with blood in one direction, and living with proph- ecy in the other. The actual historic places of reading were ironically both central and peripheral. In many cases, they began as a burial ground shared by a number of tribes in a region, attended by a small priest- hood. As in the case of the marshy site of the Roman Forum, such places were liminal often by virtue of their topogra- phy and certainly by virtue of their use. Summer 1988 JAE 41/4 The transformation of the necropolis into a Forum followed the tradition of a foundation rite, where in order to make the ground stable for building a sacrifice had to be made. In the Roman case, an apocryphal story is given about a noble- man, Curtius, who rode fully armed into the "chasm" which had opened up in the Forum, in response to the sybil's call for a sacrifice of "Rome's most valuable possession"-a citizen unafraid to die for his city.14 In the version of the story that gives S. Sylvestro this role, the mire is changed into a dragon, after the leg- end of St. George. This story echoes Marduk's battle with Taimat, Jonah's gastronomical tour of the whale, Aeneas's prophetic descent into the underworld, in fact every traditional hero's obligatoryvisitto the underworld, the theme known in Greek as the katabasis. Foundation rites were a variation of this motif, where the cornerstone was used as a place to intern a victim sacri- ficed so that the mortar might fix. Signif- icantly, the words "mortar" as well as "quick-lime" are drawn from direct references to the dead and the living (mort and vivus.) Every temple as well as every house and city thus contained a ritualized labyrinth whose function as a hero's tomb insured the stability of the building above. It is possible to see that this architectural relationship, which is present in our experience of building even after the custom of foundation is no longer pre- served, is fundamentally a matter of writing and reading. Reading as Subtractive Dimensionality Reading, from the beginning a space of divination, reveals its monstrous and privational nature in a space that is non- representational, even anti-representational. Representation seems to aim towards an additive dimensionality, which I might illustrate by the naturalistic drawing's use of one dimension (the viewer's line of sight) to construct two (the image), two to suggest three (depth), and even three to imply time as a fourth. Even in reading, it is a linear text that works additively. Repetitions, folds, and pleats build up two-dimensional images and three-dimensional places. But this form of representation is instrumental and necessary for the consumption of the text, just as the normative dimensionality of a building is necessary for its conventional use. What about the kind of reading that subtracts, or "decon- structs," dimensionality? I might note that such "Mannerist read- ings" begin with privation, and here I would like to allude to the event common to all faery tales describing the trials of a hero, and frequent enough in more sophisticated forms of literature to suggest the presence of a universal arche- type: the hero leaves home. In the 1920's Vladimir Propp analyzed all available Russian faery tales in order to identify basic motifs and laws oHorm. Discovering that in fact there were no more than thirty-one simple events, that all stories were combinations of a few or many of these events, and that no event ever occurred out of its sequence in the complete set, Propp concluded that all faery tales are of one basic type." The prominent division in the list of thirty- one events occurs between the event of someone leaving the hero's home, giving the hero the opportunity to violate some interdiction; and the hero's own departure, quest, and return. "Leaving home" in its most innocuous form generates a travel norrotive.ls ln its stronger and perhaps more primitive form, "leaving" implies dying or a similar change of state; and the visit is made, metaphorically, to the land of the dead. Since Propp, we have had the remark- ably diverse scholarship of Victor Turner, who more than any other has shown that the pilgrimages, initiation rites, dreams, and other ventures into "Iiminoid" space draw their meaning and iconography from eschatology. In other words, the exotic land of the quest is a displaced scenography of Hell and its related ter- rae incognitae. The dimensionality of lit- erary journeys to the underworld (the theme of katabasis) provides us with a model of subtractive dimensionality and, additionally, a link between primitive myth and our contemporary situation. Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

9. Iwill label the typical parts of the journey to the underworld with terms borrowed from rhetoric. In some cases, the rhetorical act is nearly identical to the dramatic one. Ekphrasis. The journey to the underworld could be regarded as the proto- type of any fictional experience, but in most cases it occurs as a story within a story. The main action is brought to a halt as the hero confronts a threshold. In Book VI of the Aeneid, Aeneas stands before the gates to the temple of Apollo, fashioned and donated by Deedolus in appreciation for his sanctuary there." The images prefigure what is to come (Deedolus = Aeneas), and if we trace back this occasion of the decorated threshold to funerary myth, we discover that the images constitute a form of map to the mazed pathways of the underworld. The three dimensions of the fictive world are stripped to two: the fascination of the image on the occasion of halted dramatic motion. Katabasis. Before the pilgrim can deci- pher fully the images before him, he is drawn away and forced to begin his descent (the two-dimensional image is exchanged for a one-dimensional movement). The involuntary nature of this initiation exemplifies an exchange of privation for prohibition. The lack of any adequate comprehension of the experience before its inception places the matter in the lap of fate, and the journey becomes a ritualized induction where the initiate is stripped of all status and power. The loss of this control, accompanied by a loss of a dimension directly symbolized in the one-dimensional journey itself, sets up a polarity. The image/ map/memory complex represents the vision of the whole, and the labyrinthine path becomes the model of all immanent experience. The riddle of the present is answered by an image that connects this moment with past and future. "Every labyrinth must have a plan," wrote Auden: image and path are two aspects of the same idea. Prosopopoeia. The end and goal of the mazed underworld journey is the gnostic place of discovery, from which the dead speak. This final point is dimensionless, but its reality is that which Borges called "the Aleph," a point in which all reality is contained in a timeless monad. Eliot's image of the axel-tree in the Quartets, or any of the countless images of the center of the earth convey the cainci- dentia oppositorum of turning and cir- cularity: motion and stillness in the same mechanism. Lestwe think that this ancient motif is unique to faery tale and myth, we should consider the "modern" use of subtractive dimensionality where irony becomes a tool capable of dismantling all "representative" relationships between the author, the reader, and the text. In many cases the role of dimensions in this deconstruction is directly evident and portrays even more clearly the role of privation (which becomes the subtraction of a previous dimensionality) and monstrosity (the direct use of one dimension in paratactic structure). The one-dimensional consumption of the line of print, whose intertwinings build three- dimensional fictive worlds, actually iso- late a final dimension: that which sepa- rates the reader from the work. The illusion of the work, which resides within this final dimension, can be broken in the presence of irony; and this irony can be brought into the test itself, in a practice called "romantic irony."18 As in Don Quixote and Tristam Shandy, the writer interrupts the reader to alert this latter to the insurmountable problems involved in completing the work. Both reader and writer consider the work as such-a possible failure-and the illusion of the fictive world seems to bubble out. But in this paradoxical space that moves from a three-dimensional fictive illusion to a four-d imensiona I iron ic rea Iity, the machine of writing is disassembled; and, with it, the god of the interior. This moment of melancholy is, for lack of any extrinsic and instrumental reference to other spaces, othertimes, and othermeanings, completely here and now. In this seem- ingly circumscribed and dimensionless point, we are equally nowhere and everywhere. The philosopher Alexander Nehamas has described moments of virtuality in his reading of Proust's Remembrance of Things Post." Nehamas argues that Proust's mesmerizing images, such as those of the lilacs, the church spires, or the jars lowered to catch minnows in the Vivonne River, are not secret codes con- ducting the reader to ideas or feelings that are primary and prior to the text. Instead, they are "things in themselves" that Proust describes as concentrated points around which fascination con- structs a kind of altar. At first, this altar seems to be a mythic mundus leading straight to the Absolute. After absorbing the ironic lessons of Proust, we rea Iize how the Absolute may be deleted without diminishing the magic of such image-altars. In my terms, such points are monsters, whose opacity or inability to communicate is interpreted as a charm that prohibits ordinary speaking. Nehamas explains that Proust himself writes from the point-of-view of one who discovers that no hidden meanings lie behind his childhood memories. Yet, by focusing on the exact moments when images become enigmatically "mute" as opposed to simply opaque, we his readers begin to understand that Proustian questions are more important than hermeneutical answers. And, one should not forget that Remembrance of Things Past was the product of Proust's self-admitted privation-his lack of something to write about. In conclusion, the theme of descent, a commonplace of poetry and literature, provides us with an atlas of "virtual reading" and tentative names for its critical moments. Additionally, in the geo- metries of ekphrasis, katabasis, and prosopopoeia we have a means of connecting our contemporary and architectural situation with an ancient and liter- ary one. Architecture as a Material Narrative It has been observed frequently that architects have "nothing to write about," that architecture is dead. Certainly, most of our writing and thinking about architecture is dead, too. In the act of mourn- ing, perhaps we can raise the possibility of rebirth, put in pragmatic terms. To do this, we must learn how to "think through things," to engage the "material imag- Summer 1988 JAE41/4 Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

10. ination." And, just as there is a philosophy of conceptual thought, there may also be a philosophy of this kind of "thought-through-things." Where the first type of philosophy adapts a style of cat- egorical oppositions and subsequent resolutions, the philosophy of a materi- alist form of thought may aspire to the Medieval style of seeing, where at any and every level of phenomena, the pat- tern of universals is worked inwardly through the necessities of form that is also idea. The "imaginative universal" invented by Vico as the principle of myth has a counterpart in the universal that architects must invent for themselves in rejecting the authoritarian structure of history, contemporary philosophy, or technology. Itseemsto me that sucha universal begins with the lie, that is, the story. The story helps one avoid a contemporary paradox, which Imight label "the simultaneous scorn of truth and worship of facts."2o The present-day Cretan, unlike the Cre- tan of the ancient paradox, is obliged by the modern worship of facts to assert that "AII Cretans"-that is, all mod- erns-"tell the truth." This is just as paradoxical an assertion, since it involves the same logical fallacy of self-reference. The possibility of an architecture true in contemporary terms, meaningful without nostalgic references to the past, depends on an inventiveness that solves this paradox of compulsive truth-telling. Again, it is Vico who has foreseen this situation with clairvoyant precision: "The poet ... because his business is with the majority of men, induces persuasion by giving plastic portrayals of exalted actions and characters; he works, as it were, with 'invented' examples. As a result, he may depart from the daily semblances of truth, in order to be able to frame a loftier semblance of reality. He departs from inconstant, unpredict- able nature in order to pursue a more constant, more abiding reality. He cre- ates imaginary figments which, in a way, are more real than physical reality itseIf."21 Vico had remarked earlier in the same Summer 1988 JAE 41/4 6.1 6.2 6.3 work that, while "the man who is learned but destitute of prudence deduces the lowest truths from the highest, the sage instead derives the highest truths from the unimportant ones."22 The drawings of Curt Dilger (Fig. 6) serve as a heuristic guide to the elevation of the ephemeral to the universol." Appearing at first to be located somewhere between the representation of fragmentary form and the development of hieroglyphs, Dilger's drawings work singly and in series to dissolve the "retinal" evidence of reality into a solution that begins to crystallize the virtual. In the process of this diges- tion of conventional form, a kind of mor- tification takes place. Reticular lines, marks of construction, and the flotsam of a pictorial "wind" that sweeps the landscape free of conventional references establish an ironic and anti-representational space where the question of dimensionality can no longer be put in terms of geometric relations to a picture plane. The drawings, no less than the hero of the quest, enact ekphrasis, katabasis, and prosopopoeia. And, no 6.4 6.5 6.6 less than the polished wall of the Viet- nam Veterans' Memorial, they engage the Mannerist values of virtuality, secrecy, and monstrosity. They must be read, and in being read, their "sombre pages" recall the possiblity of burning stors." Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this paper were read at the School of Architecture and Land- scape Architecture, University of Min- nesota and the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The author is indebted to Mary Alice Dixon Hinson, Garth Rockcastle, David Leath- erbarrow, Dennis Playdon, Wladislaw Strumillo, Lawrence Wolfe, Marco Fras- cari, John Templer, George Dodds, and Louis Inserra for comments and criti- cisms of these earl ier works. He is especially grateful to Curt Dilger for his comments on this work in all its stages, and appreciates this artist's permission to use and discuss his drawings. Part of the research of this investigation was funded by a Research Initiation Grant provided by Penn State University. Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

11. 6.7 6.8 gramic and calligraphic deformations of space. This unti- tIed series of nine drawings, a part of this project, was produced especially for this essay. 24 This reference and the opening inscription were taken from Stevens, Wallace The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Vintage Books (New York) 1982, pp. 146-147. the Beginning, the End of the End," Perspecta 21, Yale School of Architecture (New Haven) 1984, pp. 154-172. In particular, Eisenman (p. 171) has called forwhatthis essay attempts to provide in limited detail: 110 not-classical architecture [that] begins actively to involve an idea of a reader conscious of his own identity as a reader rather than as a user or observer." 5 Mukarovsky, Jan Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value and Social Facts (Mark E. Suino, trans.) Deportment of Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) 1979 6. It would be presumptuous and cumbersome to provide on adequate bibliography to cover these topics, but I might refer the reader to Kunze, Donald Thoughtand Place: The Architecture of Eternal Places in the Philosophy of Giam- battista Vico P. Lang (New York) 1987. 7 Vico, op. cit.. §379 8 ibid., §384 9 For the topic of "irncqinctive universality," consult Verene, Donald Phillip Vico's Science of Imagination Cornell Uni- versity Press (Ithaca, New York) 1981, pp. 65-95. 10 Bloom, Harold Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens Yale University Press (New Hoven) 1976, pp.16-17 11. Avgvstini Stevchi Evgvbini (Steuco, Agostino) De perenni philosophia libri X Nicolavm Bryling et Sebastianvm Francken (Basel) 1542, Bk.VII,Ch. 10 12 Vico, Giambattista TheAulobiography of Giambattislo Vico (Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, trans.) Cornell University Press (lthoco, New York) 1957, pp. 148- 149 13 de Certeou, Michel Heterologies: Discourse on the Other University of Minnesota (Minneapolis) 1986, pp. 67-79 14 Burdick, Lewis D. Foundation Rites, With Some Kindred Ceremonies The Abbey Press (New York) 1901; also consult the authoritative standard work, Rykwert, Joseph The Idea of the Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World Princeton University Press (Princeton, New Jersey) 1976. 15 Propp, Vladimir Morphology of the Folk Tale (Laurence Scott, trans.) University of Texas Press (Austin) 1968 16 Rother than leave the reader with the impression that this is a trivial category, r would mention a subtle essay by Johnstone, Henry W. "Odysseus as a Treveler: A Cate- gorical Study," in Categories: A Colloquium (Henry W. Johnstone, ed.) Penn State University Department of Phi- losophy (University Park, Pennsylvania) 1979. Here, John- stone characterizes philosophical thought as "authentic travel," through episodes drawn from the Homeric Odys- sey. 17 Kunze, Donald and Wesley Wei, "The Vanity of Architec- ture: Topical Thinking and the Practice of Discontinuity," Via 8 University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts (Phil- adelphia, PAl 1986, pp. 54-69 18 Furst, lilian R. Fictions of RomanticIronyHarvard Univer- sity Press (Cambridge) 1984 19 Nehamas, Alexander, "Writer, Text, Work, Author," lec- ture delivered at the Philosophy Colloquium, Penn State University (University Park, Pennsylvania) 1987 20 lowe this pithy observation to the philosopher Prof. David Black, who teaches the "rhetoric of toys" and other sub- jects at the University of Scranton (Pennsylvania). 21 Giambattista Vico 0" the Study Methods of Our Time trans. Elio Gianturco, The Library of the Liberal Arts (New York) 1965, p. 43 22 ibid., p. 34 23 Curt Dilger is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania currently teaching at Temple University. His studios investigate the role of narrative, discontinuity, and seriality of architecture in "sites" and "parasites." He is currently engaged in producing drawings that investigate ideo- J $' 'ijP'- / 6.9 Bochelord, Goston L'Eau et les Reves, Essoi sur I'lmagi- nation de 10 Matiere J. Corti (Paris) 1942, p.1 (outhor's translation) 2 For a veritable atlos of this spcce. see Millenson, Susan F. SirJohn Soane's Museum UMIReseorch Press (AnnArbor, Michigan) 1987; for the brilliont connection between Scone's mirrors and Joycian poetics, I om indebted to Bloomer, Jennifer "In the Museyroom," Assemblage 5. 3 Vico, Giambattista The New Science of Giambattista Vice (Thomas Goddard Bergin ond Max Harold Fisch, trans.) Cornell University Press (Ithaca, New York) 1968, §410. For an introduction to the issueof monstrosity token broadly, see Ceord, Jean Lo Nature et les prodiges: L'lnsolite au XVle siec1e, en France Librorie Droz (Geneva) 1977 and Friedman, John B. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought Harvard University Press (Cambridge) 1981. Application of the ideo of monster to architecture istreated in Froscori, Marco "The Monsters of Representation and the Fundion of Architecturol Monsters," unpublished ms. (February 8, 1988) and Kunze, Donald "The Role of the Monster in Architectural Production and Interpretction," Proceedings of the Semiotic Society of America (19861,pp. 146-154. 4 Curtius, Ernst European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Willord R.Trcsk, trons.) Princeton University (Prince- ton, New Jersey) 1953. See 0150 Monk, Somuel H. The Sublime, a Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-CenturyEng- land Modern Language Association of America (New York) 1935. Itshould be mentioned that the present essay in many points of detail and even fundamental presuppositions sympathizes and sometimes duplicatesthe original insights of Eisenmon, Peter "The End of the Classical: the End of Notes Summer 1988 JAE41/4 Downloadedby[NewYorkUniversity]at12:3406May2015

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